“Come,” said he, “I wish it.”

He turned to the negresses: 

“Dress your mistress at once.”

And boor as he was at the bottom, the son of a southern nail-maker asserting itself in this crisis which moved him so deeply, he threw back the coverlids with a brutal and contemptuous gesture, knocking down the innumerable toys they bore, and forcing the half-clad Levantine to bound to her feet with a promptitude amazing in so massive a person.  She roared at the outrage, drew the folds of her dalmatic against her bust, pushed her cap sideways on her dishevelled hair, and began to abuse her husband.

“Never, understand me, never!  You may drag me sooner to this——­”

The filth flowed from her heavy lips as from a spout.  Jansoulet could have imagined himself in some frightful den of the port of Marseilles, at some quarrel of prostitutes and bullies, or again at some open-air dispute between Genoese, Maltese, and Provencal hags, gleaning on the quays round the sacks of wheat, and abusing each other, crouched in the whirlwinds of golden dust.  She was indeed a Levantine of a seaport, a spoiled child, who, in the evening, left alone, had heard from her terrace or from her gondola the sailors revile each other in every tongue of the Latin seas, and had remembered it all.  The wretched man looked at her, frightened, terrified at what she forced him to hear, at her grotesque figure, foaming and gasping: 

“No, I will not go—­no, I will not go!”

And this was the mother of his children, a daughter of the Afchins!  Suddenly, at the thought that his fate was in the hands of this woman, that it would only cost her a dress to put on to save him—­and that time was flying—­that soon it would be too late, a criminal feeling rose to his brain and distorted his features.  He came straight to her, his hands contracted, with such a terrible expression that the daughter of the Afchins, frightened, rushed, calling towards the door by which the masseur had just gone out: 

“Aristide!”

This cry, the words, this intimacy of his wife with a servant!  Jansoulet stopped, his rage suddenly calmed; then, with a gesture of disgust, he flung himself out, slamming the doors, more eager to fly the misfortune and the horror whose presence he divined in his own home, than to seek elsewhere the help he had been promised.

A quarter of an hour later he made his appearance at the Hemerlingues’, making a despairing gesture as he entered to the banker, and approached the baroness stammering the ready-made phrase he had heard repeated so often the night of his ball, “His wife, very unwell—­most grieved not to have been able to come—­” She did not give him time to finish, rose slowly, unwound herself like a long and slender snake from the pleated folds of her tight dress, and said, without looking at him, “Oh, I knew—­I knew!” then changed her place and took no more notice of him.  He attempted to approach Hemerlingue, but the good man seemed absorbed in his conversation with Maurice Trott.  Then he went to sit down near Mme. Jenkins, whose isolation seemed like his own.  But, even while talking to the poor woman, as languid as he was preoccupied, he was watching the baroness doing the honours of this drawing-room, so comfortable when compared with his own gilded halls.